


Let Every Traveller Be Found

by Siria



Series: Nantucket AU [41]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-17
Updated: 2007-09-17
Packaged: 2017-10-03 19:47:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first couple weeks after John gets out, he doesn't do much. The Air Force makes it pretty clear they don't want him to stay—no dishonourable discharge, but no possible way for him to stay and hold his head up high—but that doesn't mean he has anywhere to go. Cheap motel near the base the first few nights, then an impersonal little one bedroom apartment on the outskirts of the town proper where he thinks idly about going some place with sun and surf and sand and anonymity—and John knows himself well enough to know that he could just go on like this for years, never let himself settle, keep on looking for the opposite of what he needs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let Every Traveller Be Found

**Author's Note:**

> For Aesc on her birthday. Thanks to Cate for betaing.

The first couple weeks after John gets out, he doesn't do much. The Air Force makes it pretty clear they don't want him to stay—no dishonourable discharge, but no possible way for him to stay and hold his head up high—but that doesn't mean he has anywhere to go. Cheap motel near the base the first few nights, then an impersonal little one bedroom apartment on the outskirts of the town proper where he thinks idly about going some place with sun and surf and sand and anonymity—and John knows himself well enough to know that he could just go on like this for years, never let himself settle, keep on looking for the opposite of what he needs.

But then he ends up back in his physio's waiting room, glowering at the fresh pink scar tissue on his knee that's been refusing to heal as it should; sitting there for a solid hour waiting, and staring at the depressing hotel art on the pale magnolia walls, and waiting, and flicking idly through the months old magazines on the low coffee table in front of him. Recipes and real-life stories and advice on now-obsolete computers; and then John leafs through a tattered copy of _National Geographic_, and sees an article on zip code 02257. He runs his fingers over the glossy pages, the bright pictures, and remembers a single trip there as a kid—leaving his grandparents' rental cottage in the early morning and spending all day outside, running through a landscape that seemed made just for him, ocean and air and sand and salt, private pathways that he pushed through scrub and bushes, scrapes on his elbows and scabs on his knees and the biggest smile on a face that he turned to greet the biggest sky.

And later, when Laura is making small talk with him—where he's going to go and what he's going to do, inconsequential nothings about the rest of his life—to distract him from the white-hot pain in his knee, and he's trying his best to breathe his way through it, he exhales and says "I was thinking maybe Nantucket."

*****

He eyes his bank balance, does the math in his head, kicks a couple of tires, and soon he's the new owner of a far-from-new Grand Wagoneer. Her dark green paintwork's a little faded, there's a dent in the rear bumper, and there are more than a few miles on the clock, but she's a solid old girl, runs smooth for him still, his hands steady on the wheel, and he thinks he can coax one more long journey out of her at least. All John's stuff fits into the back—a duffel bag or two of clothes, couple boxes of books and CDs and photos, his guitar, a big ole comforter his Grandma made for him back his first year in college—and his fingers tap out a beat on the wheel while she eats up the miles beneath him.

It takes him longer than he thought it would to get there, how quickly he can travel in one day constrained by the brace around his knee, the need to stop and stretch and press warmth into protesting muscles every couple of hours. By the time he reaches New Bedford a little while before noon on a grey and drizzling Tuesday, he's stiff and sore and his joints are already feeling the kind of aches that living in a damp and temperamental climate brings. He gets out of the car to stretch out his knee, and ends up having breakfast in a little mom and pop place, lingering over his coffee and staring out the window at the low and darkening horizon. Just beyond it lies the end of his journey, and that realisation comes as a little jolt; he's spent so much of the past year outside of things, purposeless, liminal, that arriving somewhere he wants to be is enough to set his nerves on edge. Enough to make him roll his eyes at himself. _Buck up, John_, he thinks.

He pays up, leaves a handful of quarters next to his empty cup as a tip, and heads back to the car. He turns up his collar against the rain as he walks, feels the salt air hit the back of his throat, and thinks of the prospect of tomorrow on Nantucket, a tomorrow where he's going to have to start living again. The smile on his face makes his cheeks hurt; it feels good.

*****

The expression on his face is a little different come the following afternoon; he's looked in the windows of almost every realtor in the Town, and the rental price of even the smallest house on the island is enough to make both his eyebrows rise up in shock. He knew it wasn't exactly cheap here, yeah, but he could probably buy a brand new car for the cost of renting a holiday cottage here for a _week_. He winces at the thought of the long holiday spent here as a kid, wonders how deep his grandparents had had to dig into their retirement savings to give him a summer here, and wanders down the street, rubbing his chest against the ache that the sudden remembrance of deep affection brings.

By the time he reaches the end of the street, his knee's kicking up again and he's almost made up his mind to head somewhere else, catch the ferry back to the mainland and keep on driving; even with all his combat back-pay and the money his mother left him, he'd be pushed to scrape together half of the down payment, let alone the mortgage. Still, memories keep him walking, lead him further west down along the coast, draw his gaze out to the sea and the beach and the wide-open sky, and he's so caught up in thinking of the past that he hardly notices that he's ended up there—right near that stretch of beach he'd played on as a kid.

John strikes back up towards the road, wondering if maybe he'll be able to find the house he stayed in once. Maybe memory's tricking him, though, or maybe the house has fallen victim to thirty years and soaring house prices. He can find no trace of a neat little bungalow, snug and green-painted, that had hugged close to the ground and opened wide windows onto the sea; frowns and looks again and thinks maybe it once stood where a big, brash three storey house stands now behind high walls.

John stands looking at it, hands in his pockets, and wrinkles his nose; he can't figure why someone would want to come here and drop a couple million dollars only to live in a house that pulls away from the sea, all its windows closed up tight. He sighs, and is just about to turn back towards the town, when he hears someone calling him from the house across the sandy road.

"You don't like it much either, huh?"

John looks over to see an elderly man leaning over a picket fence. His stance reminds John a little of his own grandfather, though this man is taller, thinner, with a nose like a hatchet and a mouth made for mischief. "It's, uh... big," John says lamely, scratching at the back of his neck.

"Looks like an ornament from a French whore's boudoir, is what," the man grumps, and John almost chokes on his own spit. Not so much like Grandpa, then, who went to church twice on Sundays and looked like he wanted to wash John's mouth out with soap if he said so much as 'darn' in his presence.

"Sure," John manages eventually, shifting uneasily from foot to foot and trying not to let himself think about whether or not this guy has much experience with Parisian prostitutes.

"You staying down with the Mortensens?" The man nods four or five houses down; John looks in the same direction and sees a big, white Victorian house, garden full of people milling around; he thinks he can smell smoke from a barbecue, hear the sounds of laughter and music carried on the breeze.

"No," John shrugs, "Just passing through."

He'd leave it at that, nod politely and keep on walking, but the man stays leaning on his fence, looking at John with an expression that's genuine interest, not faked curiosity, and John feels the strangest kind of impulse to volunteer more. He shuffles his feet a little and says, "Stayed around here with my grandparents when I was a kid, thought maybe I'd walk down and have a look at the place where we used to stay, but uh..."

"It got knocked down by someone with more money than sense? Mmm," the man says, "Shame." He peers at John more closely. "Well, I guess you'd better come in for a beer, then," he says, turns on his heel and heads into the house without looking back.

John blinks once or twice, nonplussed; but it's not like he's got anywhere to rush to, the guy doesn't sound actively crazy, and a beer kind of sounds good. He ambles his way up the drive, shells crunching syncopated beneath his limping feet, and into the cool dark of a small living room, where the man—"Abe Wilson's my name"—gives him a cold bottle of Sam Adams, sits him down, fusses with the TV until he finds a game of football, then sits down in the armchair nearest the window and talks at him until John figures his ear is fit to fall off.

It's the kind of thing John'd normally hate, making small talk with a stranger in a room crammed with other people's memories—photos on the walls, books on the shelves, knickknacks on every surface—but Abe seems a good sort of guy. He knows about football and his island, served with the Air Force in Korea, talks without asking much of John in return, has an aching edge of loneliness he tries to hide for a wife of forty years whose picture hangs on every wall, whom Abe doesn't mention, not once. John likes the house, too; it's a family home, not a holiday home, all warm colours and scuffed wood floors, and he can feel his spine relaxing against the over-stuffed sofa.

"You staying here for the summer?" Abe asks after they've both urged the quarterback on screen to a triumphant first and down.

"Nah," John says, shrugging, one eye still on the tv screen, "Was thinking of maybe getting a place here, but..."

"You got more sense than money?" Abe says.

John smiles, a little rueful, a little self-conscious. "Don't know that I'd say that, either."

Abe eyes him, takes a speculative pull on his bottle, then says, "You can have this place, if you're interested."

John chokes on his beer a little, then laughs, then goes back to choking when he sees the expression on Abe's face. "You're _serious_?"

Abe shrugs. "Have to sell up soon anyway, moving down to live with my daughter in Fort Lauderdale. She's worried I'm going to have a heart attack or break a hip or stroke out underneath an underage stripper from Hoboken called Cyndi. Probably for the best; I'm not getting any younger, and neither's my rheumatism."

"Well," John says, the edge of his voice wry, "I wish you and Cyndi all the best, sir, but I really don't think I can—"

"Look at it like this," Abe says, popping the cap off another beer for both of them, "you'll be doing me a favour if you take the old place of my hands. I won't have to track down the realtor least likely to charge me thirty per cent commission and half my immortal soul, and I can leave knowing that you're not going to tear this place down in two weeks, build a couple of ugly condos on top of it."

"That's... real nice of you to offer," John says awkwardly, "but I can't, I mean—"

"Tell you what," Abe says, leaning back in his chair, "I'll let you have it for half market value."

John picks at the label on his beer bottle, feeling unaccountably sheepish at this offer he wasn't looking for. This house is a long way from being the largest one on this road, or the most modern, or even in the best condition—its charm lies in its wide windows, its open doors, the blowsy roses that ramble over the peeling grey clapboard, the sense of comfort that's settled into its very timbers—but even so, John knows that half its market value is more than he can afford. Not if he wants to be able to eat, as well.

"Well then," Abe says, "what _can_ you afford?"

John stiffens a little, thinks and hopes, mumbles a price that's at the very upper limit of what he thinks he could scrape together, even if he puts on his only suit and flattens down his hair and makes extremely nice to his bank manager; it's a price that couldn't get him more than a cardboard box to live in on this island.

Abe hums to himself, knocks back another gulp of beer and says, "Okay, done."

"What?" John falters. He figures he was blind-sided less often by the Taliban, the shifting sands outside Jalalabad more stable than the floorboards are beneath his feet right now, and he can feel a twinge of phantom pain in his knee, as if he really has lost his footing; he's not so used to the kindness of strangers.

Abe grins at him, smug and satisfied; on screen, the home team scores a touchdown in what has to be the winning move of the game, less than two minutes to go, and the crowd, predictably, going wild; and in two days' time, John's signing on the dotted line and pledging to spend the next thirty years of his life working to pay for two small, ramshackle storeys that lean into the sky, roses that trail around his door and a smile on his face that he's not felt in years. He figures it's not such a bad trade-off to make.

*****

It figures, of course, that moving in—helping shift out Abe's heavy, old-fashioned furniture, walking all over the Town in search of this and that, dumping his couple of boxes into the middle of the now empty living room—sets his knee off again, and he spends most of his first two weeks in the house sleeping on a futon spread out right there on the floor. The pain is a constant, seems not to lessen even with all the PT that his insurance can get him, wakes him in the middle of the night and leaves him staring at the ceiling and gasping, pulling him backwards into his own memories.

He can't seem to do anything, go anywhere, and that leaves him discontented, anxious and out of sorts with himself, and he finds himself starting to think, in odd moments and the worst ones, of the island as a kind of cage, of the house as a too-small place to hide. And that's enough to get him out and moving again, grunting with pain and frustration as he crunches his way the length of the shell-strewn drive, over and over; he's got pride, of a kind, a determination not to let himself go under, and if there's one thing Afghanistan taught him, it's that he never wants to hide again.

Outside, the air is cleaner, the sky is blue, and when he looks up he can see the swoop and soar of birds, the high-up and white trail of a Cessna 402, and he grins and redoubles his pace; he knows the kind of freedom he's aiming for.

*****

"How did you end up here, anyway?" Rodney asks him their first Christmas together. He's wrestling their tree into submission in the corner—he can't bear the thoughts of it not being perpendicular with the floor—while John sprawls in his armchair, eating the popcorn that they're supposed to be using to decorate said tree while working his way through Chapter 24 of _War and Peace_.

John cocks an eyebrow. "I... drove the car back from the store? Remember, I'm the guy who brought you coffee and bear claws, you professed a gratitude that could only be truly satisfied with sexual favours? My name is _John_," he presses on, grinning, when he sees Rodney shoot him a pissy look from beneath two boughs of pine.

"You are such a comedian," Rodney says, "Watch how my sides split. No, I meant—I was just curious—I know where thirty hours straight without sleep got me, but how did you end up _here_ here? I thought all your family was from one of the ridiculous states, Alabama or New Mexico or something."

John looks at Rodney; at the Christmas cards on the mantelpiece—one of which bears a shaky signature from a man in Fort Lauderdale, Florida—and the dog and cat curled up warm on the rug in front of him; out the bay window at the pale and familiar winter sky, the first sky that was ever his alone. "It's kind of a long story," he says in the end, "about this guy from Nantucket called Abe, and a French hooker's—"

"Oh, _fine_," Rodney huffs, exasperated, "_don't_ tell me then." He pushes his way out from the branches of the—now perfectly vertical—tree and stalks into the kitchen to make yet another cup of coffee, but his hand trails warm across John's hair as he passes; and John's laugh is deep and startling, unexpectedly rich, fading to linger in the corners of his mouth when Rodney comes back to sit with him, warm and wanted against his side.


End file.
